Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,141

things to talk about, like how I was coping with my medical condition. But part of me also knew that this was just an excuse I was giving myself, that this intervention could be useful, that the movement of dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can’t. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That’s partly what dance therapy is about. It’s another technique some therapists use.

But still—no.

“I’m your therapist and a guy,” Wendell says today, adding that we all interact with people in different ways based on any number of things we notice about them. Political correctness aside, we aren’t emotionally blind to qualities like appearance, wardrobe, gender, race, ethnicity, or age. That’s the way transference works. If my therapist were a woman, he says, I’d react to her based on the ways I relate to women. If Wendell were short, I’d react to him as somebody who’s short rather than tall. If . . .

As he talks, I can’t stop staring at the “new” him, trying to make the adjustment. It occurs to me that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t been attracted to Wendell earlier. It was that I hadn’t been attracted to anyone. I was grieving, and it’s only upon my gradual emergence that I’ve begun to feel attraction in the world again.

Sometimes when a new patient comes in, I ask not just “What brings you here?” but “What brings you here now?” The now is the key. Why this year, this month, this day, have you decided to come talk to me? It seemed like the breakup was my answer to “Why now?” but underneath it was my stuckness and my grief.

“I wish I could stop crying!” I’d told Wendell early on when I felt like a human fire hydrant.

But Wendell saw it differently. He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—in Boyfriend’s case—in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he’d kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn’t me.

And still people try to suppress their feelings. Just a week before, a patient had told me that she couldn’t go a single night without turning on her TV, falling asleep to it, and waking up hours later. “Where did my evening go?” she asked from my couch. But the real question was, where had her feelings gone?

Another patient recently lamented, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those people who doesn’t overthink anything, who just goes with the flow—who lives the unexamined life?” I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.

So it’s not that I’m in love with Wendell. The fact that I’m finally noticing him not just as a therapist but as a man is simply evidence that our work together has helped me rejoin the human race. I feel attraction again. I’ve even begun dating, dipping my toe in the water.

Before I leave, I ask about the “Why now?” of Wendell’s office renovation, of his beard.

“What made you do all this?” I ask.

The beard, he says, was the result of being out of the office and not needing to shave; when it was time to come back, he decided he liked it. As for the office makeover, he says simply, “It was time.”

“But why now?” I ask, trying to phrase my next question graciously. “It seems like you’d had that furniture for, um . . . a long while?”

Wendell laughs. I didn’t hide the subtext very well. “Sometimes,” he says, “change is like that.”

Back in the waiting area, I move past the new modern-looking screen separating the exit from the seating. Outside, heat mirages rise on the sidewalk, and as I wait for the light, the Imagine Dragons song pops into my head again. I’ve been waiting to smile, ’ey, been